July 2014

By Michael Farrell

On May 8,1855, in the days before there were any bridges across the wide Missouri, a surveyor named Charles Manners and two teams of eight surveyors under contract to the US government crossed the already fabled and still untamed river in a canoe piloted by a local Native American tribal member. It took them several trips back and forth across the river to move the entire team and all their gear. On the last trip the canoe almost swamped and sank because it was overloaded down to the gunnels with a cast iron monument that weighed between five hundred and six hundred pounds. The surveyors noted in their records that only the considerable paddling skills of their Indian canoeist kept them from sinking.

Once the survey team and their gear were safely on the west side of the Missouri, they hauled the iron marker to a high bluff overlooking the river valley. After some searching they found a wooden post overgrown with weeds that had been erected the previous year to mark the place where the fortieth parallel of latitude intersects the Missouri.

By Katie Nieland

The Great Plains Art Museum opened a new exhibit titled “Contemporary Indigeneity: The New Art of the Great Plains” on June 1. The exhibit will run until July 27.

A blind jury of Plains researchers, conservationists, artists, and museum workers chose more than forty pieces of art that examine current Native American life and culture for inclusion in the show. Works chosen include sculpture, textiles, paint, crafts, and more.

Review by Lopa Banerjee

On the third of May, 1960, a girl child is born in a home delivery filled with complications and questions. As she is miraculously “harvested,” her mother dies. In the opening chapter of Margaret Lukas’s debut novel, Farthest House, readers are transported to a tragic, moving, and suspenseful world of family secrets. The narrative, complex and lyrical from the start, becomes spine chilling the moment we know that it is told by none other than the spirit of Amelie-Anais, dead nineteen years. From the opening, the novel is a roller-coaster ride of powerful, unsettling emotions as the ghost narrates the account of the baby’s birth, connecting the story to her own life in eastern France and the Plains of Nebraska. The girl, named Willow, born with a minor physical handicap, instantly becomes the narrator’s focus, and the story moves forward from there in layers, recounting Willow’s transition from a helpless baby to a bewildered young woman and a passionate painter.

By Peter Carrels

We’ve been raising cattle in the Swan Creek Valley for a long time,” said Lyle Perman when asked via telephone how long he’d been involved in agriculture. He stretched out the word “long” and articulated “the Swan Creek Valley” like someone who has for a lifetime emphasized a deeply felt “place” as a means to orient his life.

Perman’s Rock Hills Ranch straddles Swan Creek in south-central Walworth County, South Dakota, about forty-five miles south of the North Dakota border. The Missouri River’s artificial impoundment named Oahe is a dozen miles west, and through all that distance is a rolling, rangy landscape. East of the ranch the topography flattens out and opens up for fifty miles until it gets turbulent again, dropping like a gentle rapids built of bluffs and small hills before spilling into the James River lowlands. Some of Perman’s ranch land sits at two thousand feet above sea level. The floor of the James River valley is 1,290 or so.

By Steve Ress and Steve Comfort

Sometimes rather thorny and extensive groundwater contamination problems can be overcome with the right combination of innovation, experimentation, and partnership.

That’s what a researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources is hoping will provide a possible answer for cleaning up a large plume of contaminated groundwater just east of Grand Island.

By Paul A. Johnsgard

Over the first sixty-mile segment of the Niobrara National Scenic and Recreational River, the river makes a graceful bend south, reaching its southernmost point along the northern border of Rock County. There, about twelve miles northeast of Bassett, a new Audubon wildlife sanctuary is situated, like a green emerald set dangling below the blue necklace that is the Niobrara.

The sanctuary, nearly five thousand acres in expanse, is the remarkable gift of the late Harold Hutton, son of a prominent multigenerational homesteading family and a rancher, author, and entrepreneur. Harold was also a lover of nature and decided that he would like to have his land preserved as a nature sanctuary after his death. He initially approached the National Audubon Society, which proved to be unwilling to promise that the land might not be ultimately sold. Luckily, Harold found a willing and interested listener in the form of Ron Klataske, executive director of Audubon of Kansas.

By Sally J. Herrin, PhD

Milo Reno called the American Farm Bureau “the bastard child of the railroad trust and the Chamber of Commerce.” The enormous early success of the cooperative elevators, livestock commissions, exchanges, insurance, and other ventures cut US business monopolies to the quick, as co-op market share increased rapidly in every sector. Desperate to derail the cooperative movement, the US Chamber of Commerce and the railroads, with the complicity of the USDA (which preferred to deal with a more docile farm organization than Farmers Union), invented the AFB as a rival farm organization with a vague and watered-down mission statement similar to, but lacking the edge of, Farmers Union. Today, the Farm Bureau is supported by mandatory dues from its enormous insurance operation—six million members claimed, though US farmers number less than two million. Today the Farm Bureau continues to confound farmers with counterproductive political recommendations and rhetoric. Along with many check-off funded commodity organizations such as the Cattlemen and National Corn Growers, the Farm Bureau at both the state and national level effectively serves the interest of food processors, some of the largest and most powerful multinational corporations on earth.